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Electronic Warfare

 

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My websites have been experiencing "brute force" or DDOS attacks for the past several weeks. Finally, my monitoring service Jetpack sent me this message showing a total 118 lifetime brute force attacks on just one of my three websites, so you can likely multiply 118 by three = about 348 attacks. Each attack lasts from 5 to 15 or 20 minutes. "DDOS" stands for "Distributed Denial Of Service" which means some rogue actors have infected unwary people's computers with botnet malware that turns their computers into robots which send a rapid stream of requests to a disliked website. Then the botnet controller, most often a hacker in Russia or Bulgaria, transmits a command to the botnet to bring down my server by brute force, flooding it with thousands upon thousands of connection requests per second. The result is that my server can't respond to so many connection requests and it crashes temporarily.

As you can see here (click to see it larger), I received 46 messages from Jetpack just from 6 Dec. through 12 Dec., one telling me that my website is down and the next telling me that the website is up again. The downtime intervals can be computed by the times between these messages. What this all means is that some person or persons most likely in Russia strongly disagree with what I've been writing about Moscow's invasion and destruction of Ukraine, so they are trying to keep visitors from readimg my online reporting.

This is just one kind of "electronic warfare" – there are several varieties, such as "spoofing" email messages that might appear to be from me and contain salacious or just plain dishonest content: "disinformation." Or a state actor can jam the electronic airwaves so that radio, TV, cellphone towers, internet traffic, or even GPS signals can't get through. Or an army might broadcast fake commands to its soldiers to mislead the enemy into believing that an attack is aiming in one direction when actually the attack will aim in another direction. Thank the Lord that so far, the attacks on my websites have just been of the electronic variety!

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